Ray Johnson, Untitled, 1927-89

The North American artist Ray Johnson (Detroit, 1927 – New York, 1995) is one of the most unknown yet most influential artists of his generation. This exhibition, the first to be dedicated to the artist in Spain, presents a retrospective of his collages and mailings.

At the end of the 1940s, Ray Johnson studied painting under the tutelage of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. Here he was to make the acquaintance of Bill de Kooning, Richard Lippold, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. He later moved to New York where, in the mid-1950s, he abandoned painting in search of a new mode of expression. He cut up his abstract canvases and began composing collages, which, in turn, were to become the building blocks for more complex pieces in which the fragments were strewn with images from popular culture. His creations included images of Elvis Presley, James Dean, Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe, among others, in a manner that anticipated the imaginary Andy Warhol would use in the 1960s. Noteworthy among his first collages are the “moticos”, irregularly shaped panels that constituted his critique of the abstract rules of the triangle and that he would recycle throughout his career.

It was also during the 1950s that, while continuing with collage, Ray Johnson began exploring the possibilities of Mail Art. He gradually built up a network of contacts with whom he exchanged ideas and artworks. By way of this network, he mailed an enormous quantity of material, including postcards, fragments of his collages, drawings with instructions (“please add to & return…”), found objects and annotated newspaper clippings. In 1968, this correspondence network was consolidated as the “New York Correspondence School”, which was to become the clearing house for a web of artistic communication that would eventually spread across the globe.